


The Pardoner

by Huntsmonsters



Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: Angst, Drama
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-06
Updated: 2012-05-13
Packaged: 2017-11-04 22:38:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/398975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huntsmonsters/pseuds/Huntsmonsters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>' No, this was just a trick gone badly, one more act of mischief gone a bit awry. In the end, this would not be the end.'<br/>They ask, who is the pardoned, and who is the pardoner? Who opens the ways of the world to death? [Spoilers for Avengers]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. bicched

**Author's Note:**

> So! This was written in part to get this meta out of my system, and to spark off a longer story. I'm still working out the details for the latter. Suffice to say, this is my version of how I imagine things could go for Loki post-movie. Not really many other characters just yet, but they'll come in later. If I don't get a chance to continue this, however, like it pretty well as a stand-alone, but if people like it, I'm definitely down to continue.
> 
> You can subscribe to this story with 'Subscribe' button at the top of this page. You can also follow my [tumblr](http://huntsmonsters.tumblr.com/) for updates.

  
And as they sat, they heard a bell clink  
Before a corpse was carried to his grave  
That one of them 'gan callen to his knave:  
"Go bet," quod he "and ask readily  
What corpse is this that passes here forby,  
And look that thou report his nam well."  
"Sir," quod this boy, "it needeth never a deal.  
It was me told ere you came here two hours.  
He was, pardee, an old fellow of yours,  
And suddenly he was y-slain tonight  
Fordrunk as he sat on his bench upright.  
There came a privy thief men clepeth Death stealthy thief called  
That in this country all the people slayeth  
And with his spear he smote his heart in two  
And went his way withouten words mo'.  
He has a thousand slain this pestilence,  
And, master, ere you come in his presénce  
Methinketh that it were necessary  
For to beware of such an adversary.  
Be ready for to meet him evermore.  
Thus taught me my dame. I say no more.  
-The Pardoner's Tale, Chaucer 

Where does it begin? Nothing could be more difficult to explain. Perhaps it began in the last battle, the final thrust. Loki lay on the floor of Tony Stark's penthouse, pinned in a silhouette shaped to his body in the floor, and he thought _what an ignoble way to die_.

Of course, this won't be how he goes. The monster left him alive for a reason, after all. There was punishment in his future, pain. Odin.

It was this last thought that drew the anger up and flooding his limbs again, dulling the pain. He couldn't lose. He wouldn't.

He had dreams of Asgard, after his fall. Deep in the night, while his servants worked like mindless insects, swarming over his beautiful machine, he would sometimes sleep. In the depths beyond wakefulness, he would experience fragments and blue-tinted flashes. He dreamed of the world the Tesseract had shown him, the world as it would be when it belonged to him. He dreamed of a thousand thousand rows of bowed heads, prepared to follow his every whim, serve his every wish. He dreamed of blue eyes that trusted him completely, that loved him as master. And if it was forced, what did that matter? He coveted their devotion, so complete, so full of _longing_. 

Thor knew that look well. He had gone through life eliciting that look with the slightest smile, with his every feat of daring. He never had to try. Even when he was an arrogant, self-righteous, war-mongering fool, the people smiled to see him go. They did not smile at the tall, pale thing that trailed behind. They did not wish him well, or commend him to visit their homes, jokingly ask him to wed their daughters. They nodded, and offered the respect due to a prince, and not a modicum more. Position could make them respect you, but it could not make them love.

Loki pushed himself up onto the second step, wincing with pain, ribs cracking and shifting, the bones rubbing against one another resonating all the way into his teeth.

To think of the way his servants looked on him now, their thready blue eyes lit with devotion, it stoked the wicked fire in his heart. 

But he did not always dream dreams of conquest. Sometimes, he dreamed of the home that wasn't home, not anymore. He still called himself Asgardian, because Asgardian he was, and always would be, no matter his parentage. He would never be one of those brutes that lived on their cold little realm, spinning pointlessly through space, howling with blizzard winds.

He dreamed of the gold towers, the sweet incense, the heady delights of the market district. The bright, righteous shine of the royal guard's armor. 

He never dreamed he saw Odin's face, only his hand, reaching down to strike the scepter from Loki's grip. He would wake, and clutch for the scepter where it always was, curled against his side. They would never take his power from him again. They could shut him away for a thousand years, flaying him each day within an inch of his life, and he would still hold something locked inside him they could never have.

He didn't like these Asgardian dreams, these pointless reminiscences of a life never to be had again, but sometimes even he could not fight off the harrowing of exhaustion. His body was as erratic as everything else, lately. He would be filled with energy, with purpose, walking tall and straight, and then find himself wracked with pain and weakness. 

It was magic sickness - he remembered it from when he was a boy. He would slip off into the quiet places in the palace to work on his own, skipping his lessons in swordplay to teach himself in sorcery. Someone would always come find him and pull him back by his ear, but even then, no taller than his mother's waist, he remembered looking at his brother at practice and thinking, _I will never be that. That will never be me._

There came a time when the desperate sword masters gave up on him. They stopped trying to teach to strength, and began teaching him to use smaller weapons - daggers, spears, short swords. It was as if everyone had universally acknowledged what Loki already felt. He watched his brother tossing practice hammers, picking up broadswords like feathers, and then looked at the delicate throwing daggers he'd been handed. And he hated. 

He grew good. Not good, excellent. With his weapons of choice, he was better than anyone, but what did that matter when he was expected to follow his father, to be a warrior first? Many forgot the Allfather's other side, master of knowledge, not unskilled in magic himself. They only remembered the front-facing part of their ruler, leader of men into battle and wielder of great weapons. In comparison, the younger brother became over the years all the more the lesser in every way. Not as thick in the arm as his brother, too lean and hungry. Not as strong as his brother, barely able to lift some of the hammers he used for practice. Not as charming. Not as, not as, not as.

They said he would make a good advisor to the king. He was the one with the sharp mind, even those most critical of his failings admitted that. The dark-haired Odinson had an eye for strategy that his golden brother did not, and he would be well-suited to stand beside the throne in times of war.

Yes. Always beside, just off center, and behind, where the shadow fell.

But magic sickness - yes, he had been thinking of it, hadn't he? He pulled himself flat on the top step, dark nails digging into the floor. He'd felt it as a boy, when he'd first begun channeling his frustrations into sorcery. He hadn't known how far was safe to push, then, and often stepped beyond his bounds. His tricks, done around the edges to take the heat off his bitterness as it mounted year by year, were often magical in nature, like the time he turned his brother into a frog. In retrospect it was still hilarious, but he'd been so terrified when it actually worked, just an idle curse he'd found in a book and pronounced against his brother when Thor took the last of the sweetbreads he liked for the thousandth time. He'd hid his brother in a drawer for days before they were both found, Thor sitting in a pile of shirts, croaking, and Loki pale and shivering with sickness. Too much magic poured out of a small body. He shouldn't have been able to do it at all. Most Asgardians wouldn't have the power to do such a thing in all their lives, so why the young prince do it? No one knew the answer but Odin and Frigga, and they remained silent.

He had felt it here, on Earth, these last few months. He would bend the Tesseract, or channel his power through the scepter over and over, until finally his body refused to go on. Even he had limits. But he knew better than anyone that pushing them was the way you became stronger. Each time he wore his magic thin, it came back better, more powerful. What could Thor's strength say to that?

Loki spat blood onto the floor, and grinned. His teeth were pink. Yes. He might lose today, but there were so very many ways to slip Asgardian bonds. They would take his scepter, and the Tesseract, and they would put him in a cage. What creative tortures would the Allfather concoct for his lost, ill-begotten adopted son? He could hardly _wait_ to see.

He turned round, and there they all were. He'd heard the explosion a few minutes before, sealing this failure. Why, a few minutes ago, had he feared Odin? There was nothing to frighten him in Asgard. They could do whatever they liked to him, and nothing would change.

No, this was just a trick gone badly, one more act of mischief gone a bit awry. In the end, this would not be the end.

"I'll have that drink now," he told them, with a smile. As they hauled him up and dragged him from the room, he wondered whether Odin would even admit to the Asgardian people that his son was now bound in a cage somewhere. No. They would strike his name from the record entirely and leave him to rot, finally admitting what he knew they had always felt - that he was the one best left forgotten.


	2. binden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The guards moved slowly, tenderly protective of their fingers as they reached out, as if sticking their hands into the maw of a rabid animal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know where this one is going now, and I think it ought to be good. Thanks for all the kudos and support on the first chapter! I expect future chapters will get churned out a bit quicker.
> 
> You can subscribe to this story with 'Subscribe' button at the top of this page. You can also follow my [tumblr](http://huntsmonsters.tumblr.com/) for updates.

They held him in the dark to wait for the journey back to Asgard.. He sat in the cell, head bowed low, thinking.

The vise they’d clasped over his mouth was fixed to his jawbone. Thor had tried to order SHIELD not to use it, but he was overruled. Someone had convinced the organization that Loki's magic was fed by his ability to speak. What did they think this was, some Midgardian fairy tale? As if he really needed something as stupidly mundane as a 'magic word' to make them all cry themselves to sleep at night. No, if they should have feared anything his mouth might do, it was his perfectly ordinary words and the way he forged them into a weapon, how he might tease them into submission without them ever knowing he'd done a thing. He saw a little understanding of that in Director Fury's eyes when he told Thor for the third time that they would muzzle his brother despite whatever feelings he had about the matter. “If you want to take him back to Asgard instead of seeing him sit for war crimes on Earth, you will follow that order.” And Thor did, but not without a look over at Loki, who had been sitting with his hands bound tightly behind him, looking out the window of the massive, behemoth airship they operated from, watching New York’s smoking streets fade beneath the clouds as they rose into the stratosphere.

Loki’s hands were bound in a mundane way, just good,simple steel cable that he hadn't bothered to unwind. He had spent much of his magic surreptitiously finishing the job SHIELD’s quiet, efficient, resentful healers had begun, removing stitches with a twitch of his fingers, mending his own ribs with spikes of pain and a cracking of bones. Even if he spent the last of his energies on removing the bonds, the ‘Avengers’ were still gathered in the room outside, guarding him until he and Thor returned to Asgard the next morning. They were celebratory, likely glutting themselves on food and wine, relishing their victory. He could hear them laughing with each other, and he felt rage ripple through him, like hot coals stoked by a breath.

All that mattered now was escaping. He would go to one of the dark places in the universe that he knew, and make them all wish Odin had never picked him up from the place where he’d been abandoned in the ice to die.

Loki gritted his teeth against the stinging metal in his mouth, biting down against the electronics in it that opened to allow food and drink but paralyzed his tongue. He’d caught Thor's eye when they put it on him, when the thing connected with neat metal bolts to the bones of his jaw with splintering agony, and Thor had turned away, unable to watch. Loki knew what he was thinking of, for he was thinking of it also - that day, years before, when Loki’s lips were sewn shut as punishment for his silver tongue. Thor and the rest of them had laughed him out of the palace, reveling in the gifts he had brought them as Loki stumbled into the wilderness. He had pried the sanguine thread loose and pulled it free from the bleeding holes in his lips, spitting wet gore on the snow below the spindly pines.

 

When they came for Loki a few hours into his confinement, he winced away from the light of the open door. Thor entered the room, alongside guards of SHIELD. The men were tense. They feared him as Thor obviously did not, and Loki watched them, his green eyes almost luminescent.

"We're going to untie your hands, now," one of the guards said. It was a female, with dark hair. He remembered seeing her before - Maria, she was called. She reminded him a little of Sif, with the same dark eyes and hard mouth. If he only he had his tongue to use, what things he could have told her about her life and the closures within her. Derived only from the way she held her head and that businesslike tone, he would relate the years of being underestimated and ignored by teammates, clawing her way up with flat, short nails, hardscrabble, proving herself on each and every team despite the dubious looks when she arrived for mission debriefings with those marvelous breasts taut against her uniform. How all those years had taught her to rebuff every look a man gave, so much so that she could no longer find the latch to open her heart to anyone, and her decision to lead the soldier’s life had now set in lines around her grim, pretty lips, unkissed and chaste, like a warrior maid. They would stamp deeper and deeper each year, as hard eyes and a hard heart found their way.

"You try anything, and these men are going to shoot you. Understood?"

He said nothing, of course. They bound his mouth, then requested his consent, and that was a good trick.

He looked down at the hands of the guards beside her, and when he saw what they were holding his eyes narrowed. He knew the workmanship on those manacles in an instant, and when they brought them into the light, he saw the runes on them and knew their purpose, too. His eyes darted up to Thor. Thor looked back at him, mouth set in a grim line, but his eyes speaking to something like pity.

Loki slid back as far as he could manage as the guards came closer, turning his face from them. The guards moved slowly, tenderly protective of their fingers as they reached out, as if sticking their hands into the maw of a rabid animal.

The one on the left came just close enough, and Loki’s foot shot out, tripping him to the floor. He got as far as putting the heel of his boot on the back of the man’s head, and arcing small flickers of green fire between his fingers, when the barrel of a gun pressed to the back of his head from behind.

Loki held still, and the fire at his hands dissipated into nothing. The man on the floor clambered back to his feet, and shot Loki a dirty look that he returned with amusement. The gun was hardly a threat, really. If it hadn’t been for the creatures outside, whom he knew had turned their attention to the cell by how quiet things had become, he would have melted the metal over the soldier’s hands, and left him screaming on the floor.

He held still, while the soldier kept the gun to his head, and the other solider pulled the cable loose from his aching hands. He barely had a chance to stretch his fingers before they were clasping the manacles around his wrists, clicking them closed and backing a few steps away.

Loki heard a sound like a hammer on an anvil inside his mind, and convulsed immediately, his body going taut, falling back to the floor in a sharp, bent line of pain. He heard the click of guns coming up and safeties being disengaged, but the woman said, "Hold."

He barely heard, feeling only the searing of his magic being drained from him into the cold iron that bound him. Becoming mundane felt like dying, like someone had opened his veins and was bleeding them into a basin. He closed his eyes, going limp on the floor, still flinching every now and again as another crack of the enchantment flashed through him, drawing still more of his power into the binding. He could feel the manacles turning his magic against him, using it to strengthen themselves. There was so much magic in them by then that even Thor likely could not break them. Through the pain, he wondered if Thor was still watching, or if he'd gone back to join his _friends_. The flash of fierce, infuriated amusement was cut short by another ripple of the chain.

When it was done, he was pale and grey. He stared through slitted eyes at the opposite wall, a sheet of dark glass he knew Fury had been watching him from behind, and he heard the guards step back and clear the room. He barely had the energy to blink, let alone speak or rouse himself to fight them again. "Thor," said the woman, and some silent exchange must have taken place between them, out of Loki's line of sight, because she walked away a moment later.

There was the faint clink of plate on plate as Thor stepped closer to his once-brother, comma-curled on the floor of the metal cell. Loki could hear him breathing. His magic gone, exhausted and spent, all his senses were on high alert, trying to compensate.

He heard Thor sit down behind him, a clumsy drop of heavy weight. Loki tensed, but he could not tense far. He wanted to pull away from him, but his worn body would not permit it.

Thor sighed. "Oh, Loki."

There was a warm weight, then, resting on the back of Loki's head, amongst the tangled fan of his raven-wing hair, harbinger of how much golden Thor was not his brother. The weight moved, and it was a hand, with fingers that settled into the dark strands.

This was the right of the victor, he supposed. He stared directly ahead. The dark glass reflected Thor's image, wavery and indistinct. Loki couldn’t read his expression.

There was a faint crackle, and Loki’s chin lifted a little, even with his head on the ground. What, would Thor torture him more? Take out yet more penance for his precious human lives?

It was only when his eyelids grew heavy that he realized what is happening. Thor knew a very little magic, just a few simple spells Loki taught him on a whim when they were children. He never had the patience to learn any more, or the knack. Just household things - how to open some locked doors, how to mend a broken glass. How to lull someone to sleep.

He hated him. He hated him. To offer him the amnesty of sleep - everything Thor did made Loki want to tear him to pieces, to sup on his meat and bones, make true every old story of cannibal Jotunn beasts that devoured their enemies, slick his tongue with his blood.

And then his eyes shuttered closed, and his tense body went slack. More darkness lay before him, and he did not dream.

 

The rest was perfunctory. The humans were immensely eager to get him and the Tesseract off their planet before anyone had a chance to stop Thor making him someone else’s problem.

They went into the central park of New York, a city that still smelled of fire and ash on the wind after the events of the day before. Loki was escorted by his brother only - they knew that the manacles would prevent him from doing much harm, and he’d gone quietly enough. His body was still attempting to adjust to the lack of magic in his system, and it was difficult to lift his arms, let alone attack anyone.

When they released him into his brother’s custody, Loki wasn’t listening to the glee of the ‘Avengers’, or the obvious relief of SHIELD’s operatives. No, he was looking at his brother, who extended the Tesseract to him in its pretty golden cage. It was their ticket home. Home.

Loki glanced up at Thor, and saw the determination in his eyes. And what else was there - shame, perhaps? Anticipation of what delirious punishments Odin would dream up for the wayward son?

Inside the metal vise on his mouth, Loki tried to, and could not, bite down on his tongue. He took hold of the Tesseract and felt himself pulled up, into the irrevocable grip of the pull of another world.

He had always felt that pull, in his own way.


End file.
